THE LATEST NONSENSE ABOUT RACE

I am not sure that this summary of a commentary by Arne Ohman, of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden is really worth mentioning but the final sentence in the extract below could mislead:

"By treating men and women like Pavlov's dogs, and giving them electric shocks while they looked at pictures of black and white men, researchers have unravelled our innate and learnt reactions to race. We have evolved to fear people from a different group to our own, in the same way they we fear spiders and snakes, it was found. But close contact can help counter this inherent fear."

Both the things found were rather like proving that grass is green. 1). That people still have some tribal tendencies and tend to be most at ease with people similar to themselves is uncontroversial. 2). The actual second finding about "close contact" was simply that New Yorkers who had dated someone from another race were less fearful of other races. How surprising! Asserting that the dating influenced the attitude rather than the other way around is is absurd.

The original research referred to by Ohman is here. There is a better summary of the work here

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ELSEWHERE

An Australian example of the "professionalism" of mainstream journalism: "Few journalists resort to fantasy, but the issue has aired publicly after The Sunday Telegraph's property writer, Cindy Martin, was accused of journalistic imaginings by the ABC's Media Watch program. The program exposed instances when Martin linked celebrities with properties on the market. Checks with the rich and famous found they had not evinced interest in homes and apartments. The Martin affair has rocked The Sunday Telegraph and starkly exposed the increasingly blurred line between fact and fantasy in some publications".

Burgess gets another Leftist scalp: "News just in: The Daily Ablution can claim its second scalp for Burgess's work the on Sassygate scandal. The Guardian's executive editor for news, Albert Scardino, has just resigned according to Burgess. Burgess reports that his source at The Guardian said Scardino's position had become "untenable" due to the split between Aslam's supporters and those who wanted him gone. Editor Alan Rushbridger has conceded that this affair and its internal repercussions constitute "a significant crisis for the paper".

As in Marxism, it is the privileged who are the vanguards of jihad: "When you read reports that the Muslim terrorists who bombed the London Underground may have gotten together for a pre-attack whitewater rafting trip in Wales, you realize that this is a very particular enemy -- and one that is recognizable to students of history. This is the revolt of the privileged, Islamic version. They have risen so far, so fast in the dizzying culture of the West that they have become enraged, disoriented and vulnerable to manipulation. Their spiritual leader is a Saudi billionaire's son who grew up with big ideas and too much money".

Muslim against Muslim: "The latest reliable report confirms that on average 33 Iraqis die every day, executed by Iraqis and foreign jihadis and suicide bombers, not by US or British soldiers. In fact, fewer than ever US or British soldiers are dying since the invasion more than two years ago. Instead, we now watch on television hundreds of innocent Iraqis lying without limbs, bleeding in the streets dead or wounded for life. If this is jihad someone got his religious education completely upside down. Palestine is on fire, too, with Palestinian armed groups fighting one another - Hamas against Fatah and all against the Palestinian Authority. All have rendered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas impotent and have diminished the world's respect and sympathy for Palestinian sufferings."

The Leftist chickens come home to roost on us all: "Being a rational thinker, it is often impossible to understand how Democrats can be so stupid. What exactly do the Democrats think is going to happen when they Balkanize America and invent categories for people so that no one is an American any longer but rather an "African-American" or an "Hispanic-American" or a woman or a homosexual whose allegiance shouldn't be to America but rather to the "cultural heritage" or the unique behavior that "defines" him or her? What do the Democrats think is going to happen when English is not the language of everyone but everyone is to speak his own language (even made up slang like "ebonics") so that communities become isolated and antagonistic and incapable of communicating with one another to solve differences and problems?... What's going to happen is exactly what has happened in London where native-born children blow the skulls off their "fellow countrymen." After all, thanks to the liberals there, what did these murderers have in common with the people they destroyed?"

European impotence fuels anti-Americanism: "Bush-hating has also given Europeans a marvelous distraction from their own failures; their failure in the Balkans, their failure to come up with a constitution for the European Union, their failure to build an independent military force, their failure to put together a single, coherent European foreign policy. In so many ways, Europeans who once ran the world now feel impotent to affect international events or even get their own house in order. They float like a lovely but rudderless old yacht in the surging wake of an American aircraft carrier. So, Europeans do the one thing that makes them feel superior: revile Bush, the lunatic cowboy, and all those gun-toting, overweight, money-obsessed, religion-crazed Americans who chose him as their president.

All Gods are not the same: "The atheist, when confronted with two distinct religious illusions does not jump to the conclusion that they are both aimed at invoking the same supreme being. Instead of looking up toward the transcendent object of the illusion, he is able to look at the quality of the illusion itself, and to the practical and concrete consequences of this illusion on the lives of those who subscribe to it. Religious illusions, when approached from this direction, clearly reveal themselves as distinctive as different forms of social organization -- as distinctive as feudalism and capitalism, communism and meritocracy. Indeed, the atheist will quickly see that few things can differ more profoundly than the diverse ways in which human beings have imagined the nature of the Divine".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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